If you are looking for a new framework to help you build a web site, then you need to know about Vanilla JS. This is the most powerful and lightweight of all the frameworks. It is already in use by a huge number of websites and autodownloaded by most browsers.

In fact, Vanilla JS is already used on more websites than jQuery, Prototype JS, MooTools, YUI, and Google Web Toolkit - combined.

To be more accurate Vanilla JS is used at least in part by the majority of websites including - Facebook, Google, YouTube, Yahoo and so on.

Standard features supported out of the box, not that there is a box, include closures; DOM selectors/manipulation; Ajax; a sophisticated event handling system; 2D graphics and 3D in some cases; full regular expression support; and so on. In fact, almost anything you want is included in Vanilla JS.

Not only that it is fast. The Vanilla JS main page has some speed comparisons but we can't resist quoting the benchmark for DOM object retrieval:

Code

ops / sec

Vanilla JS

document.getElementById('test-table');

12,137,211

Dojo

dojo.byId('test-table');

5,443,343

Prototype JS

$('test-table')

2,940,734

Ext JS

delete Ext.elCache['test-table']; Ext.get('test-table');

997,562

jQuery

$jq('#test-table');

350,557

YUI

YAHOO.util.Dom.get('test-table');

326,534

MooTools

document.id('test-table');

78,802

Notice that the best alternative framework is less more than twice as slow and everyone's favourite jQuery is four times slower. Just think of all that speed you are giving up! Other benchmarks reveal an even bigger advantage for Vanilla JS.

Excited?

So were we.

And amazingly we discovered that we were already downloading Vanilla JS and even using it occasionally.

If you can't wait to get started visit the Vanilla JS site for more information.

We should all be grateful to the Vanilla JS team for maintaining so many lines of code and finding a scheme that makes up-dates completely unnecessary.

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